Publication

  • Climax Change! How Architecture Must Transform in the Age of Ecological Emergency
    Pedro Gadanho
    Author
    Actar Publishers, 2022
  • GRANTEE
    Pedro Gadanho
    GRANT YEAR
    2021

Forensic Architecture, NDVI – 1979 to 1986 from Genocide in the Ixil Triangle, 2014. A Normalized Difference Vegetation Index (NDVI) analysis of the environmental transformation of the Ixil region between 1979 and 1986 shows substantial changes to the natural and urban environments in the region, 2021. Photo: Forensic Architecture

This publication offers an overview of how the current environmental emergency will affect the practice of architecture, both in terms of its day-to-day design responses, and opportunities to innovate and transform the discipline's current aesthetic, ethical and professional drives. At a crossroads in which the construction sector and built environment produce nearly forty percent of greenhouse gases accountable for global warming, architects are just starting to acknowledge their complicity in an impending disaster. In need of a paradigm shift similar to that of the modern movement, the field desperately needs clear guidelines and targets so as to operate its inevitable transformation towards an ecologically friendly design logic. From historical analyses of ecocide or the environmental avant-gardes, to topics such as decarbonization, degrowth, the great transition and the aspirations of Green New Deals, Climax Change! is structured around ten essays that delve into today's climate change debates, bringing them home to architectural thinking.

Pedro Gadanho is an architect, curator, and writer. He was a Loeb Fellow at Harvard University. He led a recognized architecture renovation practice until 2012, when he became the curator of contemporary architecture at The Museum of Modern Art, New York. There, he curated the Young Architects Program and exhibitions such as 9+1 Ways of Being Political, Uneven Growth, and A Japanese Constellation. He was the founding director of MAAT, Lisbon’s Museum of Art, Architecture and Technology, where he initiated more than fifty projects, including publications such as Utopia / Dystopia, Tension & Conflict, and Eco-Visionaries. He has edited Beyond, Short-Stories on the Post-Contemporary, the ShrapnelContemporary blog, and contributes regularly to international publications. He wrote Arquitetura em Público, a recipient of the FAD Prize for Thought and Criticism in 2012. He holds a master’s degree from Kent University and a doctorate in architecture and mass media from the University of Porto.